A gay lawyer and his estranged mother confront the past when he takes on an asylum case in “Mothers and Sons.” In an email interview, the author credited law school, and research on Albania, for getting the details right. SCOTT HELLER
What books are on your night stand?
“The Fabric of the Cosmos,” by Brian Greene, a wonderfully detailed account for lay people of what relativity, quantum physics and string theory have to say about physical reality. “Ornament of Precious Liberation,” a kind of monastic handbook on the stages of Buddhist doctrine, by Gampopa, a 12th-century Tibetan master. Also, “Harrow,” by Joy Williams, whose sentences make me smile again and again, and “The Gallery,” by John Horne Burns, a smoky, boozy and occasionally gay vision of Naples at the end of World War II.
What books might people be surprised to find on your shelves?
A lot of Immanuel Kant. A lot of English Romantic poetry. And a lot of books on drug trafficking.
Describe your ideal reading experience.
Late afternoon, early evening, recumbent, either learning something new to me, or absorbed in a novel the rhythms of which put the rest of the world at rest.
What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?
That lithium, the salt form of which is used to treat manic depression, was one of only three elements present at the birth of the universe, along with hydrogen and helium. As if the cosmos were preparing for a mental health crisis 13 billion years in the making.
How have your reading tastes changed over time?
In truth, not a great deal. Since college, I’ve been ambling in phases that last a few months at a time through fiction, history and philosophy of one sort or another.
“His prose exudes a desolation so choking that it can come only from somewhere deep inside,” a Times reviewer wrote of your first book. How did that land with you?
As a high compliment!
In hindsight, was being a Pulitzer Prize finalist for that book a blessing or a curse?
A blessing for sure. There’s nothing like encouragement, especially for a first book. Encouragement and the respect of one’s peers. “Keep going” — that’s what writers always need to hear, because there are so many sound reasons not to.
Did your law degree help in exploring the legal asylum system in the new book?
Yes, because going to law school is like learning a new language, and once you can read it, you can get a more granular sense of how people wield it and the habits of mind it encourages, which is to say a sense of character. If you want to write about doctors, for instance, it helps to know what their training does to their perception.
What other research did it require?
Mostly talking to immigration lawyers, sitting in immigration court, and learning a good deal about the history of modern Albania.
Which literary mothers and sons loom large for you?
To be honest, the echo I had in mind in choosing the title was with Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons,” given the theme of incomprehension between generations in that book, as well as the friendship between the two younger men at the heart of the story.
What impact has teaching had on your writing?
A sporadic one, as I’ve only taught sporadically, but of late, as I get older, I would say it offers me the chance to approach writing — that of my students, but also my own — with more curiosity and less judgment.
What’s the last book that made you laugh?
See Question 1: “Harrow,” by Joy Williams.
What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?
For its timing, I’d say “A Home at the End of the World,” by Michael Cunningham. My sister gave it to me for Christmas when I was 20 — a gay college kid coming of age at the height of the AIDS pandemic — and the first sections of that book, about a gay boy and his brother, are still emblazoned in my mind.
Which subjects do you wish more authors would write about?
How people experience the jobs they do; how, where, when and why people experience wonder and awe; and also politics, not in the electoral sense but in the lived sense. It’s so hard to do, particularly now, but so needed. We fight politically in two dimensions, but live in at least four.
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
According to Ray Monk’s brilliant biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein may have met Virginia Woolf at one of John Maynard Keynes’s parties, but “neither seems to have made much impression on the other.” (Wittgenstein was often stiff or rude around women.) Rather than organize another party, I’d like to have been seated between them at that one. I somehow imagine myself easing Wittgenstein’s rigidity and drawing the two of them into a conversation about the pleasures of language and the balance between faith and doubt in a writer or thinker’s life.